Ridgefield Middle School Talent Nite
| Q | Briefly describe your background/training. |
| A | Multiple Choice A.) A theater degree at a liberal arts college B.) Fancy conservatory of high arts ‘n’ culture C.) Lunchbox sketch comedy group D.) Theater camp E.) Supersize Me F.) A+C+D |
| Q | How old were you when you knew you wanted to be an artist? |
| A | From the time we were pretty young we both knew we wanted to do something with performance. Slowly as we’ve gotten older though, this dream of performing has become more specific and more tailored to the people we are rather than the people we might have wanted to be. Giving up our dreams of being Velma Kelly & Roxie Hart, and embracing Jo Firestone & Dylan Marron, for example. |
| Q | Who is your greatest professional inspiration and why? |
| A | We really admire folks like the creators of Avenue Q and Summer Heights High – people who were different and really ambitious and from there were able to make fantastic original work. |
| Q | How do you manage wearing different 'hats' as a self-producing artist? What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? |
| A | Wearing the many “hats” has been one of our biggest challenges, but also one of the things that has given us the most artistic freedom. It’s a sacrifice you make. We are our own publicists, producers, costume designers, set makers, stagemoms etc which takes a lot of leg work, but we also only need to answer to each other and not to the many different people who would fill those positions. |
| Q | As a self-producing artist, what qualities make for a good show idea in your opinion, and what is typically your first step in realizing your artistic vision? |
| A | We like to do work we, ourselves, would enjoy. In creating work, we tend to start from what we know really well, aka kids who think they’re really talented in middle school, and then develop stories and characters from there. For us, the more comfortable we are with the place/time/characters involved, the more equipped we feel we are to delve in and find the honest ridiculousness of it all. |
| Q | How much material do you prepare for a show, and what percentage of it typically makes it into the final performance? |
| A | This is the first play we’ve created together and we don’t have an official “method” yet. But, in terms of Talent Nite, we started with the idea of a silent clown show, slowly discovered that we wanted a two-actor multi-character play, came up with the idea of a middle school talent show and brainstormed all the different people who might be part of such an event. We improvised what these people’s talents might be, or whatever role they’d take in the talent show, and slowly began weaving a story together from characters. |
| Q | Speaking as a spectator, what do you look for in performance? |
| A | We love seeing great characters thriving on stage, particularly if they are strongly-opinioned elderly women or Billy Elliot. |
| Q | What makes your work unique? |
| A | If our final product is unique… that’s for the audience to decide. In terms of our process of creating it, we definitely want to do things our way. We (painstakingly) make sure that everything from the inception of an idea to the preview performance to a final showing is exactly what we want and is represented on stage exactly the way we it to be seen. And after all that effort, our work is so “us” (and our many and varied influences) that unique-ness might be a consequence of not backing down. |
| Q | What does 'success' mean to you? |
| A | Oh, well duh. Success means, um … yes, it’s clearly, well, sure, um…money. No, well, not money…well, yes, money, but alongside respect. Respectful money. Or moneyed respect? A warm home? Groceries at Whole Foods? Groceries? Fuck, we don’t know, go ask Ray Romano. |
| Q | Why are you doing the Capital Fringe Festival and the upcoming fallFRINGE (Nov. 4–21)? |
| A | Fringe Festivals — and other events that bring non-commercial theater artists together — are incredible in that they unite a group of people who are dedicating their lives to the less-glamorous, but beautiful, side of performing. Over the summer we met some of the coolest people who are just so into what they do and eager to learn how other people do what they do. It creates a family in a world that can seem like unfamiliar territory. |
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